This idea to boost California’s voter turnout is a losing ticket: Opinion

Here in the Opinion section, we’ve heard a lot of bad ideas for trying to improve voter turnout, including one from a contender for California statewide office. But the one we just read about hits the bad-idea jackpot.

No doubt this would draw more people to the polls. But it’s a cheap stunt — cheap if you don’t count the $1 million — that doesn’t address the problem at its root. It won’t make people any more engaged with their communities and interested in public affairs, unless you picture apathetic citizens saying, “Well, as long as I’m planning to indulge my greed, I might as well start reading the newspaper and studying the issues.”

Guerra seems to think it’s worth raising turnout for its own sake, telling KPCC the election results wouldn’t suffer if people voted simply to get into the lottery. Guerra said, “There is no data to show that uninformed voters make worse decision than informed voters.” He pointed to the fact that supposedly informed people gave 9.5 percent of the votes for California secretary of state to Leland Yee, the state senator who’s on leave while facing felony charges of corruption and arms trafficking.

The lottery idea is marginally worse than secretary of state candidate Pete Peterson’s idea for raising turnout by giving voters stickers good for free drinks at Starbucks.

Lotteries and lattes. If California’s best political minds think these are the best hopes for getting people interested in who runs their government, that this is simply a marketing problem, we’re in trouble.

Voters set records for low turnout in the June 3 primary statewide (with an estimated 19.3 percent of registered voters casting ballots) and in Los Angeles County (13.6 percent). This is a serious problem that deserves serious remedies. The lottery idea is a loser.